


Unfinished Business

by whateverrrrwhatever



Series: practice prompts [12]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Ficlet Collection, M/M, Stiles Stilinski is Missing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-17
Updated: 2020-02-17
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:53:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22765780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whateverrrrwhatever/pseuds/whateverrrrwhatever
Summary: A ficlet written for the prompt "folding their clean laundry and putting it away."
Relationships: Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski
Series: practice prompts [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1626685
Comments: 4
Kudos: 31





	Unfinished Business

**Author's Note:**

> [dottie_wan_kenobi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dottie_wan_kenobi) and I have decided to work our way through a list of prompts over the next however long, which means I’ll be writing little unedited ficlets periodically and sometimes sharing them here.

The apartment is a wreck when Derek lets himself in. Clean laundry spills from a bag tossed in the entryway, and pairs of shoes litter the floor. The table’s piled with research, open books stacked atop each other, sheaves of paper tucked between them and spilling over onto the floor. An open pen is resting in a blotchy ink stain on the couch, perched above the moldy coffee cup resting on the floor next to a playstation controller.

He takes a deep breath in and tries not to sneeze. The air is stale and dusty, but everything still smells like Stiles -- like he lived here, like this was his home.

It’s the first time Derek’s been here since he disappeared, even though he knows the others have been by, looking for any shred of evidence that might lead them to wherever he is.

Derek swallows and steps further into the room. The empty apartment feels like a tomb, like a moment in time preserved, left to molder and decay. He’s pretty sure Stiles was the last person to touch the fridge, and there’s a small pile of dishes in the sink, a morning’s worth of coffee grounds and eggshells and bread crusts in the trash can. A section of the case board next to the couch has given way under the weight of too many photos and dragged papers and articles along with it; they’re scattered in a drift across the floor. 

Derek reaches for one -- a curled scrap of paper, fading yellow -- a receipt, from two months before Stiles vanished. Maybe it means something. Stiles kept it, thought it important, thought it held some piece of the stupid fucking secret he was trying to unravel. He was still trying to figure it out, he said when they’d asked. He would let them know when he had something. He was close, he said. So close to a breakthrough.

Derek wants the receipt to mean something.

He’s run out of leads, run out of ideas, run out of patience. It’s been almost two months. The pack is still looking, all of them. They refuse to give up hope and Derek’s no exception, but sometimes after another dead end, another faulty connection -- sometimes, in the middle of the night, when he’s alone, he feels a creeping dread in the pit of his stomach, prickling along the back of his neck. They’re too late. He’s gone.

But he can’t be, Derek thinks. He was just here, in this apartment, not that long ago -- drinking coffee and doing laundry and kicking off his shoes wherever and dropping his pens on the couch, just like always. He can’t be, because Stiles isn’t done yet -- he’s young, and barely beginning his life, and they need him. The pack needs him. Derek needs him, and hasn’t yet told him how much.

There’s unfinished business. He can’t be gone.

And when he comes home, he should come home to a place that’s clean and comfortable, not this -- jumbled crypt, this elegy, grayed out by a layer of dust and grime.

So Derek does the first thing that comes to mind -- he folds the laundry, neat and crisp like his mother taught him: a small controlled comfort, to run his hands over Stiles’s clothes, to leave the tiniest imprint of himself behind -- and he puts it away.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! You can also find me on [tumblr](https://whateverrrrwhatever.tumblr.com/) or [twitter](https://twitter.com/whateverrrrisay).


End file.
